Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info takes much less disk space than the initial one, so more content might be stored using the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have ample power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hard disk drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of every site located on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a couple of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is a lot better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.